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For Ahkeem Videos

For Ahkeem Photos

Movie Info

Beginning one year before the fatal police shooting of a Black teenager in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, For Ahkeem is the coming-of-age story of Daje Shelton, a Black 17-year-old girl in North St. Louis. She fights for her future as she is placed in an alternative high school and navigates the marginalized neighborhoods, biased criminal justice policies and economic devastation that have set up many Black youth like her to fail. After she is expelled from her public high school, a juvenile court judge sends Daje to the court-supervised Innovative Concept Academy, which offers her one last chance to earn a diploma. Over two years we watch as Daje struggles to maintain focus in school, attends the funerals of friends killed around her, falls in love with a classmate named Antonio, and navigates a loving-but-tumultuous relationship with her mother. As Antonio is drawn into the criminal justice system and events in Ferguson just four miles from her home seize the national spotlight, Daje learns she is pregnant and must contend with the reality of raising a young Black boy. Through Daje's intimate coming of age story, For Ahkeem illuminates challenges that many Black teenagers face in America today, and witnesses the strength, resilience, and determination it takes to survive.

Levine and Van Soest are on top of their subjects with a startling familiarity and shoot in such a clean, unfiltered style that at times you question if they're working from a script or if their subjects are actors.

A stark look at institutionalized racism and a system actively working against you, For Ahkeem, uses the personal - a young woman's success and coming into her own- to complete a bigger, often somber picture.

Van Soest and Levine were in production when Ferguson exploded over the police shooting of Michael Brown, and they're smart enough to keep those events in the background as a running reminder of what can happen to Black youth in the St. Louis area.

There's a strong dose of anthropology in this documentary, as the filmmakers construct the small world in which Daje lives and interacts with young people like herself - all black, all poor, mostly fatherless.